THE FATE OF THE RAND.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 96, 27 August 1913, Page 4

THE FATE OF THE RAND.

A day when the wonderful Rand is empty of its gold is foreshadowed by a writer in the “Nation,” who maintains that with all the pomp of wealth and the elaboration of mechanical

science, the Rand remains a mining camp. It is dominated by its pwn sense of brevity and instability. Infect any civilised society you please to select with the assurance that in twenty or thirty’ or at most forty years, its induslrv will be ended, its population scattered, and its teeming streets' the defeated prey of nature, and it would exhibit exactly the same slackening of tire normal checks on* conduct, exactly the same extrava gance ;tnd recklessness in action. New engines, new processes, now econo miss, and new experiments with la bor are for over tempting and tapping the speculative of the reef,: but each success brings with it the con scionshess that a margin is in sight and a time approaching when acctimn lating difficulties and diminishing pro fits will compel the abandonment _o f mine after mine. Haste and ’impermanence are the very breath of the too stimulating atmosphere. What ever the London financiers, who shudder at Lire very idea of any interrup tion in the stream qf gold that arrives every Saturday from Cape Town, may say, no British. Cabinet will long bo able to lend bayonets, to buttress a mine-owner’s plutocracy, says the “New Statesman.”